Mt Maudit – Brenva Shoulder 17.05.2012

An article by lucapandolfi

4361 m ; 800 m 45°- 50° ; SouthEast ; TD ; 5.3/ E3

1 st skied by the extreme ski Guru Pierre Tardivel in july 1988 with an helidrop and 1 st snowboarded in 2006 by a Finnish party, this line didn’t see many ripetitions; actually there are no infos about them.
First Snowboarding ripetition.

What a line !!!
Steep, sustained, constantely exposed to big seracs falls and located in one of the most wild and scary corners of the Mont Blanc massif : the Brenva basin.
Dropping into the Brenva side from the top is a pretty intense experience, one of those moments when you make yourself some questions.
I suddenly found myself few minutes after have dropped in, talking with the massive serac overstanding above our heads.
Looking at this line from Helbronner i didn’t realize the massive scale of the seracs and cliffs; it is much more impressive to be in it that just look at it from far away.
It has probably been the most scary face where i have been snowboarding.
A couple of times i told myself ” how ridiculous is to think to come snowboarding in this place? If you die you just deserve it ! ”
I really believe in quantum physics and i think that talking to a big piece of ice sometimes might help!
Riding this line i really felt the respect for the mountain, the fear and the infinite smallness of my being. It has been one of those moments in which the probabilities of surviving are only minimally related to my own actions; for roughfly 40 minutes our lives have been in the hands of Divine Provvidence.
The snow was a bit skatchy and slabby but perfectly skiable.
We slept at the top station of the Aiguille du Midì and left early morning.
Walking down the airy Midì ridge at night with the board on my back and strong north-west wind has been a quickly wake up!
We went up the 3 Monts route, through a pretty broken and tricky Mont Blanc du Tacul and up the Mont Maudit shoulder.
Our friend Brendan couldn’t join us last night so he came up with the first bin in the morning and we saw him from the Fourche bivy dropping alone into the line. (we were pretty worried cause was quite late).
Glad he did it!
The great day was ruined in part for me by the fact my stomach didn’t give me a break during all the morning.
I don’t remember to have been suffering so much on the mountain.
Thanks a lot to my friends for the help and patience.
I didn’t take many pictures because i was pretty busy talking to the seracs 🙂
With Tom Grant, Ben Briggs and Cedric Bernardini and Brendan O’Sullivan

Magic moments !

Our bivy room

Early morning on the Mont Blanc du Tacul

We are going to ski under all that shit !

Cedric ready to drop in

C’est partì!

On tel…”Sorry i’m pretty busy…i’ll be back in a while”…hopefully…

Cedric

Tom at the first crux

On the way up, back to the kuffner ridge

At the Col

Brendan on the face…to have an idea of the scale

Ben skiing down the steep couloir from col de la Fourche

We rode down the Vallèe blanche, up To Montenvers, down to Chamonix and me down to Passy to work !
Definately a never endind day!